205Mc Reflecting on what we did in class today.

7th October 2016

This lecture has made me more skeptical of charity and online moments. I already have an understanding the charity will try and apply to me emotionally. Is it better to gain lots of support from people who don’t really know what they are supporting, or to gain some from people who know what they are doing and where the money is going?

Did the Kony2012 do what it set out to achieve?

In a way yes it did, the intention of the campaign was to get people all over the world to know about what was happening and generate awareness.

But did they really do anything to help the people in Africa?

Yes, they created an early warning system incase of acts by the LRA, helped to build schools and other developments of both strutter and technology. How ever not all of the money raised by the Kony2012 went to these things and instead a large amount of the money went on making sure that the film was circulated online. This is one thing that people critiqued the campaign over, arguing that the film portrayed a ‘white savior’ complex. which suggests that America see’s itself as the savior of what we might assume to be either a lesser developed country (technological) or a economical unstable one. But this leads into the question as to where the people really need help, in some cases it might be yes, but just because a places doesn’t look the same as your country docent mean its a bad place.

In recent years people have become more steadily aware the fact that charities will go to the most deprived places in countries like Africa and through the use of media make it look like the whole of Africa is the same. Which is not true, as seen through the growing GDP in countries such as Nigeria and a number of other African countries.

This being said, the main goal of the campaign and the film was to make it so that Kony would be recognized by people another the world. the idea was simple to get another people to care and to say that they wanted this person to be stopped. The main aim of it wasn’t necessarily to catch Kony personally but instead to create a mass of people who would say to their governments across the world that this mattered.

However, the simple fact is that Kony was not captured because of this campaign and US forces have now been pulled out in the assistance in finding Kony.

Was it a failure? No, not completely. But it is one thing for millions of people to say that this man had to be stopped it is complete other for a few people to carry out this plan of capturing him.

Would it of helped if the campaign was still active?

Maybe, maybe not. It would keep the subject at the top of the worlds list of priories, but could a few more years have anymore impact than it already has?

It does however give the impression of a feeling of defeat, as if because it didn’t reach its ultimate end goal that it was a complete failure. And so there are no further posts, information or mention of the campaign continuing at the strength it had done in 2012.

When I watched the video for the first time, I did feel emotional with some of the images that we were shown, but I also felt a sense of hope; hope that the campaign would be successful, along wit this idea that people from all around the world could come together to try and make a difference.

I understand that as a media student I should always look at these things in a critical way and in many instances I can understand why. We question so we can understand the society we live in, while most of the time it is propelled through simple capitalism and consumerism. I still hope that campaigns and charities like these come out of good intentions.

14th October.

Today we focused upon Genre and Narrative. Within the lecture the relationship between story and Narrative was discussed. Narrative being how the sequence of event is told. While story is the actual events that take place.

The mention of both Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic relationships.

Syntagmatic= the ordering of things. The sequence they are told.

Paradigmatic= the individual sign can be replaced by another.

For the workshop we chose to do a presentation upon Donald Trump, attempting to show how the media attests to suggest that his followers are extreme. It was difficult to try and show Donald Trump as the outsider and to feel sympathy for him. I found it extremely difficult to maintain the idea of Trump as the outsider, considering that he is a White Male, with companies worth billions who try’s to say that he represents the working class.

This lecture focused upon the idea of fact or fiction. Is there really anything that can be truly seen as a fact aseptically when talking about news stories. Seeing as the stories are only a construction of reality. They can be vastly subjective in their opinion.

As a team we looked into the reporting around the killer clown phenomena that has swept across the world; first the USA and now across other counties including the UK and Australia. We looked at theories as to why the phenomenon started, with some speculating that it was a publicity stunt inline for a new film (re-make of Stephan Kings IT) which is due to be released September next year (2017).

The escalation of these incidents has been suggested to be connected with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. With some people posting their encounter with the killer clowns online, which then are shared and re-tweeted over and over again to other users and platforms.

Due to the fact that most of own daily news is gained through social media sites now days, these encounters and reports are being seen as news. Although there are no forms of regulation in regards to this kind of sharing or “news”, there is a danger of the information gained from these pieces are highly subjective with little to no fact (scientific).

Facts themselves can also be a slippery road to walk on. What are facts? Are facts universal? Or are they subjective?

They can be both universal and subjective.

Bare with me on this. Lets take the theory of gravity, its a law of physics that has been proven to exist through scientific evidence, we all accept that this is a fact. Therefore it can be suggested to be a universal truth or fact.

Of corse we could argue that the name “gravity” given to the force that keeps us on the ground is a construct and that gravity as a word does not have meaning by itself. But never the less the force is still there, it could be called “stick” or “box” or some other word, but this word not change the force or what it does. Might make the song “Gravity” from Wicked sound a little strange.

Now then on to the subjective part. While we all share some “universal truths”, we also have our own internal reasoning system by which we might decide what is true for us and what we might consider to be a fact. One of my lecture used an example of a person who is born as female, who feels and believes that they are a man. While from the outside this can be argued to not be true, for that person it is not only true but a fact. To them they are a man. This can be due to our own internal perception of reality, which has formed through both biological traits and social influences.

However it has been suggested that the only truth is “I think therefore I am” I can use reasoning to deduce that I am alive.

Overall fact and fiction not just within the media but also philosophically is a tricky question.

We know that the media leaves out carefully selected information in order to portray a representation of reality. For example choosing to shoot a photograph from a particular angle can cast someone as either the victim or the villain.

But then we have to ask is it wrong for them to show something in this way, or is it simply their interpretation of events?

Considering what is and isn’t being shown within the media. There was an example used of Nadiya Hussain who won bake off 2015 in regards to her religion. One article in regards to her winning described her as ‘Muslim Bake off favorite’ and ‘British’. As if there is an underlying assumption that a person can’t be both British and Muslim. Which can be argued to be due to a level of stereotypes seen within the media. Nadia has been seen as a very positive representation of a Muslim woman. But at the time of her winning the great British bake off there was some news being shown on Tv in regards to Isis and other radical extremist groups. Due to this being shown in the meida there was some hatred directed towards Nadiya and her family due to her religion.

Now while she is a positive representation, due to the mass amount of negative representations of Muslim people through the actions of a few, this created a negative impression of the religion.

Framing, producers choosing what angle they show something from and how the program is edited together can have an impact upon what people take from a program. For example during the British bake off 2015 there was an incident which ended in one person’s cake not setting in time. The way the program was edited together made one of the contestants on the program look like she did it on purpose. This resulted in a mass amount of backlash on Twitter and other social media sites. However we have to ask how accurate was this representation?

Ultimately we have to accept that everything shown in the media is a representation of a reality. Even programs that claim to be reality TV are highly edited in order to increase the drama within the stories and encourage audience to view a particular media artifact. Due to the fact that everything is highly mediated within the media, who it shows and who it chooses not to show can be very important. Because the producers are attempting to show the world as a particular view, however their view might not be an accurate representation of reality.